AMD Zen 4 Ryzen 9 7950X and Ryzen 5 7600X Review: Retaking The High-End
by Ryan Smith & Gavin Bonshor on September 26, 2022 9:00 AM ESTTest Bed and Setup
As per our processor testing policy, we take a premium category motherboard suitable for the socket, and equip the system with a suitable amount of memory running at the manufacturer's maximum supported frequency. This is also typically run at JEDEC subtimings where possible. It is noted that some users are not keen on this policy, stating that sometimes the maximum supported frequency is quite low, or faster memory is available at a similar price, or that the JEDEC speeds can be prohibitive for performance.
While these comments make sense, ultimately very few users apply memory profiles (either XMP or other) as they require interaction with the BIOS, and most users will fall back on JEDEC-supported speeds - this includes home users as well as industry who might want to shave off a cent or two from the cost or stay within the margins set by the manufacturer. Where possible, we will extend out testing to include faster memory modules either at the same time as the review or a later date.
The Current CPU Test Suite
For our AMD Ryzen 9 7950X and Ryzen 5 7600X testing, we are using the following test system:
| AMD Ryzen 7000 Series System (DDR5) | |
| CPU | Ryzen 9 7950X ($699) 16 Cores, 32 Threads 170 W TDP Ryzen 5 7600X ($299) 6 Cores, 12 Threads 105 W TDP |
| Motherboard | GIGABYTE X670E Aorus Master (BIOS 813b) |
| Memory | G.Skill Trident Z5 Neo 2x16 GB DDR5-5200 CL44 |
| Cooling | EK-AIO Elite 360 D-RGB 360 mm AIO |
| Storage | Crucial MX300 1TB |
| Power Supply | Corsair HX850 |
| GPUs | NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, Driver 496.49 |
| Operating Systems | Windows 11 21H1 |
As we are in a transitional period between our current CPU 2021 suite and data, and optimizing our CPU 2023 suite with different data comparisons required, we have included a varied selection of benchmarks for this review. This ranges from our traditional un-updatable Google Octane 2.0 web test, through a variety of rendering benchmarks such as CineBench R23 and Blender, to encoding, and all the way to our more scientific-related tests.
With our processor reviews, especially on a new generational product such as AMD's Ryzen 9 7950X, we also include SPEC2017 data to account for any increases (or decreases) to generational single-threaded and multi-threaded performance. It should be noted that due to the terms of the SPEC license because our benchmark results are not vetted directly by the SPEC consortium, we have to label them as ‘estimated’. The benchmark is still run and we get results out, but those results have to have the ‘estimated’ label.
Moving Foward to Our CPU 2023 Suite: What to Expect
Looking ahead to our updated CPU 2023 suite, we've updated some of our existing benchmarks to the latest and current versions (as of Sept 22) such as Blender 3.3. In terms of benchmarks from our CPU 2021 suite, we've included benchmarks such as Dwarf Fortress, Factorio, and Dr. Ian Cutress's 3DPMv2 and Crysis CPU benchmarks.
We've also added some completely new benchmarks and workloads to our suite, including an update to Blender (v3.3), C-Ray 1.1 rendering, as well as more scientific-based workloads such as SciMark 2.0 and Primesieve 1.9.0. We have also decided to add UL's latest Procyon suite which measures overall system performance when doing tasks such as office-based tasks, as well as video, and photo editing.
As it stands, we have also updated our pool of games going forward into 2023 and beyond, including the latest F1 2022 racing game, the CPU-intensive Total War Warhammer 3 real-time strategy, and the popular Hitman 3 assassin-based title.
Our aim is to provide varying levels of data points across a variety of different workloads, instruction sets, and tasks. Going forward, we will keep our CPU 2023 suite updated as frequently as possible, and when we have a consistent and suitable number of data points, it will feature on our Bench database as we continue testing new and older CPUs for varying data points.
Some of these new benchmarks will make an appearance in this review, while others won't. Our aim is to assess and subjugate our way through whatever CPUs we have on hand to add vital data points. However, some parts of our CPU 2023 suite are still under testing and it should make a full debut in our next CPU review.
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Oxford Guy - Tuesday, September 27, 2022 - link
This has been posted for years. ReplyBoredInPDX - Tuesday, September 27, 2022 - link
I’m confused. I they 720p tests you write:“All gaming tests here were run using integrated graphics, with a variation of 720p resolutions and at minimum settings.”
Yet all the prior-gen AMD CPUs tested are lacking an IGP. Am I missing something? Reply
Ryan Smith - Friday, September 30, 2022 - link
You are not missing anything; we did not run any iGPU tests. That's a bit of boilerplate text that did not get scrubbed from this article. Thanks for bringing it up! ReplyGigaplex - Wednesday, September 28, 2022 - link
There's some odd results here and the article commentary doesn't seem to touch on it. Why is the 7600X absolutely trounced in Geekbench 4.0 MT? The second slowest CPU (3600XT) more than doubles it. And yet the 7950X wins by a mile in that same test, so it shouldn't be architectural. And in some of the gaming tests, the 7600X wins, and in some it comes dead last. ReplyDribble - Wednesday, September 28, 2022 - link
The processors are particularly cache bound - i.e. it fits in cache it runs very fast, if it doesn't it falls off rapidly. That is often visible in games where it'll run amazingly in some (mostly older) games, but tend to fall off, particularly in the lows, in more complex (mostly newer) games. Replyricebunny - Wednesday, September 28, 2022 - link
The SPEC multithreaded tests are N separate instantiations of the single thread tests. That’s a perfect scenario where there is no dependency or serialization in the workload and tells us very little how the CPUs would perform in a parallel workload application. There are SPEC tests specifically designed to test parallel performance, but I do not see them included in this report. Anandtech, can you comment on this? Replyabufrejoval - Wednesday, September 28, 2022 - link
Emerging dGPUs not supporting PCIe 5.0 is just crippleware!While I can easily see that 16 lanes of PCIe 5.0 won't do much for any game, I can very much see what I'd do with the 8 lanes left over when all dGPU bandwidth requirements can be met with just 8 lanes of PCIe 5.0.
Why can't they just be good PCIe citizens and negotiate to use 16 lanes of PCIe 4.0 on lesser or previous generation boards and optimize lane allocation on higher end PCIe 5.0 systems that can then use bifurcation to add say a 100Gbit NIC, plenty of Thunderbolt 4 or better yet, something CXL?
Actually I'd be really astonished if this wasn't even an artifical cap and that the Nvidia chips may actually be able to do PCIe 5.0.
It's just that they'd much rather have people use NVlink. Reply
TheinsanegamerN - Tuesday, October 4, 2022 - link
Um....dude, 4.0x16 and 5.0x8 have the same bandwidth, and no GPU today can saturate 4.0, not even close. The 300ti OCed manages to saturate.....2.0. 3.0 is a whopping 7% faster.You got awhile man. Reply
abufrejoval - Wednesday, September 28, 2022 - link
It should be interesting to see if AMD is opening the architecture for 3rd parties to exploit the actual potential of the Ryzen 7000 chips.The current mainboard/slot era that dates back to the 1981 IBM-PC (or the Apple ][) really is coming to an end and perhaps few things highlight this as well as a 600 Watt GPU that has a 65 Watt mainboard hanging under it.
We may really need something more S100 or VME, for those old enough to understand that.
Thunderbolt cables handle 4 lanes of PCIe 3.0 today and AFAIK cables are used for much higher lane counts and PCIe revisions within high-end server chassis today, even if perhaps at shorter lengths and with connectors designed for somewhat less (especially less frequent) pluggability.
Their main advantage is vastly reduced issues with mainboard traces and much better use of 3D space to optimize air flow cooling.
Sure those cables aren't cheap, but perhaps the cross-over point for additional PCB layers has been passed. And optical interconnects are waiting in the wings: they will use cables, too.
You stick PCIe 5.0 x4 fixed length cables out from all sides of an AM5 socket and connect those either to high bandwidth devices (e.g. dGPU) or a switch (PCIe 5.0 variant of the current ASMedia), you get tons of flexibility and expandability in a box form factor, that may not resemble an age old PC very much, but deliver tons of performance and expandability in a deskside form factor.
You want to recycle all your nice PCIe 3.0 2TB NVMe drives? Just add a board that puts a PCIe 5.0 20 lane switch between (even PCIe 4.0 might do fine if it's 50% $$$).
And if your dGPU actually needs 8 lanes of PCIe 5.0 to deliver top performance, connect two of those x4 cables to undo a bit of bifurcation!
How those cable connected board would then mount in a chassis and be cooled across a large range of form factors and power ranges is up for lots of great engineers to solve, while dense servers may already provide lots of the design bricks.
Unfortunately all that would require AMD to open up the base initialization code and large parts of the BIOS, which I guess currently has the ASmedia chip(s) pretty much hardwired into it.
And AMD with all their "we don't do artificial market segmentation" publicity in the past, seem to have become far more receptive to its bottom line benefits recently, to allow a free transition from console to PC/workstation and servers of all sizes.
And it would take a high-volume vendor (or AMD itself), a client side Open Compute project or similar to push that form factor the the scale where it becomes economically viable.
It's high time for a PC 2.0 (which isn't a PS/2) to bridge into the CXL universe even on desktops and workstations. Reply
Oxford Guy - Wednesday, September 28, 2022 - link
"The current mainboard/slot era that dates back to the 1981 IBM-PC (or the Apple ][)"Absolutely nothing about the IBM PC was new. The Micral N introduced slots in a microcomputer and the S-100 bus, introduced by the Altair, became the first big standard. Reply